EVERYTHING ABOUT GOLD

Why Pure gold is known as Carat gold?

All the gold jewelry we are wearing is not made up fully with gold. Because to make the painstaking work easier, gold is mixed with other metals like copper, silver, etc. So, whenever we purchase gold we do check its purity. This purity level of gold can be checked by inquiring how many carats it is. Carat is the proportion of gold in an alloy. Most of the jewelry is 22 carats, the purest gold is 24 carats. If the amount of copper or silver is in high proportion, the gold maybe 18, 14, or 9-carat gold. 9-carat gold is the cheapest jewelry and more expensive for 22 carats and the carat gold as the gold content is more.

Uses of gold

Gold is not only profitable for its magnificent beauty also very much vital due to its other properties. Wide ranges of electronic equipment like home appliances, computers, phones are being manufactured by gold. Its extraordinary reflective power and shielding effect help spacecraft and celestial vehicles from solar radiation. Gold is also used in medical research and in the treatment of arthritis and other diseases. Nowadays gold is also used in food and drink like fruit jelly snacks, coffee, and sweets covered with gold leaf. Gold is also widely used in dentistry to replace natural teeth with golden tooth which is very expensive.

Extraction of gold

The extraction process is very much needed for gold. Do you know why is it so? Because gold is generally found mixed with rock and two methods are used to extract pure gold. The first method is to mix the gold-containing rock particles with mercury. Thus gold will dissolve in mercury to form amalgam or alloy of mercury. This amalgam is filtered and heated, hence mercury evaporates away to get the pure gold. The second method is that the mineral containing gold is added to the sodium cyanide solution. The reaction between them produces a new compound form of gold, that is filtered to remove the impurities. In the next step, zinc is added to the filtered solution that produces pure gold. With all these methods, around 1500 tonnes of gold are produced in the world yearly.

Malleability of gold

Malleability is the ability to press and stretch metals without breaking and it is so high for gold due to its softness. Even one gram of gold can be stretched over two kilometers long and beaten into a sheet of .02 mm thickness. These sheets are known as the gold leaves which are used to create books and for other purposes.

I wish this article helped you to know that gold is not only magnificent but also with a high degree of properties.